# NIDA-CLIFGAN: Natural Infrastructure Damage Assessment through Efficient Classification Combining Contrastive Learning, Information Fusion and Generative Adversarial Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.14518 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14518/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07035/) (2017)
- [xBD: A Dataset for Assessing Building Damage from Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09296/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Learning for Label-Efficient Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06985/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Effective Damage Data Generation by Fusing Imagery with Human Knowledge Using Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01380/) (2025)
- [Bridging the Modality Gap in Roadside LiDAR: A Training-Free Vision-Language Model Framework for Vehicle Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09425/) (2026)
- [Integrated Multimodal AI System for Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning, Object Sensing, and Damage Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08935/) (2026)
- [Damage Classification for 3D Point Cloud Data via 3D Data Analysis and Vision Foundation Model-based 2D Projections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08955/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

During natural disasters, aircraft and satellites are used to survey the impacted regions. Usually human experts are needed to manually label the degrees of the building damage so that proper humanitarian assistance and disaster response (HADR) can be achieved, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Expecting human labeling of major disasters over a wide area gravely slows down the HADR efforts. It is thus of crucial interest to take advantage of the cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques to speed up the natural infrastructure damage assessment process to achieve effective HADR. Accordingly, the paper demonstrates a systematic effort to achieve efficient building damage classification. First, two novel generative adversarial nets (GANs) are designed to augment data used to train the deep-learning-based classifier. Second, a contrastive learning based method using novel data structures is developed to achieve great performance. Third, by using information fusion, the classifier is effectively trained with very few training data samples for transfer learning. All the classifiers are small enough to be loaded in a smart phone or simple laptop for first responders. Based on the available overhead imagery dataset, results demonstrate data and computational efficiency with 10% of the collected data combined with a GAN reducing the time of computation from roughly half a day to about 1 hour with roughly similar classification performances.